With the GTC almost over, we can finally unveil what we've been working on for the past seven months. Brigade has made massive progress during that time in all areas: performance, quality, sampling efficiency and tremendously improved support for dynamic scenes and multi-GPU setups.
The level of realism in Brigade is just absurd and playing with it often feels like you're watching a real life movie.
We love playing GTA, so we set out to make a real-time path traced GTA like demo to be shown at Nvidia's GTC conference (and also next week at the GDC). The plan was to have hundreds of cars and pedestrians populating a living and breathing city, all path traced in real-time. A rather ambitious goal, since path tracing this kind of highly dynamic scenes in real-time was never done before, but do we love a challenge! After doing successful tests with hundreds of moving cars and characters in a city environment, we added physics, which slowed things down massively so we had to settle on just one car. Brigade was blowing our minds, time and time again, it renders monstrously fast.
The video below shows some of our tests rendered at 1280x72:
- the city scene has 750 instanced animated characters (30k triangles each, in total 22.5 million animated triangles), all of them physics driven with Bullet physics in a 600k triangle city
- the Piazza scene is fantastic to test color bleeding, there are 16384 instances of a 846k triangle city, 13.8 billion triangles in total, rendered in real-time
- interior scene from Octane Render, created by Enrico Cerica, 1 million triangles rendered in real-time
We will post screenshots and a lot more videos after the GDC.
